Thursday, October 23, 2014

Yes, Happy Lamantia Day, a celebration on the birth date (October 23, 1927) of the late great poet Philip Lamantia. I’ve posted something here each year since I started way back (ha!) in 2008, and while this is nothing yet like the annual glass of cognac and three roses on Poe’s grave, let me take a few minutes to remember, honor, and enjoy the continuing vitality of Lamantia’s work.

Of all the vibrant (sometimes darkly vibrant) wonder of Philip’s poetry, I am today while re-reading The Collected Lamantia thinking on the native son aspects of his work.

To focus on San Francisco / Frisco (Philip proudly used the latter term, with its working class roots and sonic force, in his poetry from about 1980 on) is reductive, of course, given the very worldly (and otherworldly!) aspects of Lamantia’s life and work. There’s lots of Mexico and Spain, for example, in the poetry, and other places too. Lamantia was no provincial, that’s for sure, and I’d have to agree with anyone who suggested that the idea of Elsewhere (capital E intended) is central in the work.

Among the wilder San Francisco-specific lines, one of my favorites is this, from near the end of “Other States” in Meadowlark West:

The patch of summer fogs screws the ears of the forest city

I dig the energy there, the way the torque and in-your-headness of the incoming fog gets conveyed. I think of this often when I happen upon the fog rolling in against the slopes of Mount Sutro and Mount Davidson, San Francisco’s very tree-y mid-city hills. The former is pictured here:

The patch of summer fogs screws the ears of the forest city

Most compelling to me, though, are Philip’s prophecies about San Francisco. There may not be a lot of them in the work, but Allen Ginsberg early on famously called Lamantia a “soothsayer,” and so perhaps Philip’s vision(s) regarding San Francisco’s future are something to behold.

Philip’s primary poetic prediction for The City remained consistent over the decades, and is both startling and, more and more these days seemingly more and more exactly right, given the increasing awareness of possible environmental changes compared to fifty and twenty-five years ago when Lamantia wrote his poems.

Check out these wild lines, from the prophetic / apocalyptic “Last Days of San Francisco (1962) [emphasis added here, and in the quotations that follow]:

I see the Cosmic Intervention! I see water over San Francisco!I see God putting you down, moneylovers!PLAGUESVILLE!The astrologer: BREAKUP BY SCHIZOBOMB I see oceans over Berkeley!I see the Angel’s &nbspFIRST WEDGE COME DOWN!

That is some beautiful energy, including the sounds of “Goldengate spangles,” the neologisms “PLAGUESVILLE and SCHIZOBOMB,” and the mimetic rhythmic propulsion of the final three lines. But the main point is the emphatic way Lamantia puts the imagined aqueous future. There is little doubt that it is a-coming.

Similarly, see these lines from the much later (1989) “Once in a Lifetime Starry Scape” (written on the night of the Loma Prieta Earthquake, 25 years ago this month!), in which Lamantia envisions a beautiful and quite different Telegraph Hill (re-christened “Bear Hill” or “Avian Hill”) in North Beach, in which the prominence (on which he lived) is surrounded by . . . (natch) water!:

I dream a moat between this Bear Hill I inhabitand those buildings of monolithic glassa stone bridge to this new island of three thousand,later less than five hundred humans on it,but before contact, brown bears, owls, oaks, bobcatsand lost bird species— now only fifty or so, resident to rareIt could be, again: Avian Hill, a new Ys in reverseoutlasting earthquakes from its Franciscan stone formationa true Frisco, “haven in a storm at sea”to seed a coming cycle . . .

That there is a beautiful vision, panoramic in its sweep.

I think the idea of San Francisco inundated was, for Philip, but a return to what had been. Consider please the following lines from the mid-1990s poem “Unachieved”:

Frisco once also covered with ancient wavesa kind of lost Atlantis several kalpas ago

Today, I believe in Philip’s poetic vision of San Francisco covered, or mostly covered, in water. I mean, it feels right. It’s Lamantia Day, after all.

And who knows, someday, perhaps we’ll all go for a swim down Broadway!

Monday, June 16, 2014

What spectacle confronted them when they, first the host, then the guest, emerged silently, doubly dark, from obscurity by a passage from the rear of the house into the penumbra of the garden?

The heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit.

With what meditations did Bloom accompany his demonstration to his companion of various constellations?

Meditations of evolution increasingly vaster: of the moon invisible in incipient lunation, approaching perigee: of the infinite lattiginous scintillating uncondensed milky way, discernible by daylight by an observer placed at the lower end of a cylindrical vertical shaft 5000 ft deep sunk from the surface towards the centre of the earth: of Sirius (alpha in Canis Maior) 10 lightyears (57,000,000,000,000 miles) distant and in volume 900 times the dimension of our planet: of Arcturus: of the precession of equinoxes: of Orion with belt and sextuple sun theta and nebula in which 100 of our solar systems could be contained: of moribund and of nascent new stars such as Nova in 1901: of our system plunging towards the constellation of Hercules: of the parallax or parallactic drift of socalled fixed stars, in reality evermoving wanderers from immeasurably remote eons to infinitely remote futures in comparison with which the years, threescore and ten, of allotted human life formed a parenthesis of infinitesimal brevity.

Were there obverse meditations of involution increasingly less vast?

Of the eons of geological periods recorded in the stratifications of the earth: of the myriad minute entomological organic existences concealed in cavities of the earth, beneath removable stones, in hives and mounds, of microbes, germs, bacteria, bacilli, spermatozoa: of the incalculable trillions of billions of millions of imperceptible molecules contained by cohesion of molecular affinity in a single pinhead: of the universe of human serum constellated with red and white bodies, themselves universes of void space constellated with other bodies, each, in continuity, its universe of divisible component bodies of which each was again divisible in divisions of redivisible component bodies, dividends and divisors ever diminishing without actual division till, if the progress were carried far enough, nought nowhere was never reached.